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  1. No Work for a Theory of Grounding.Jessica M. Wilson - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (5-6):535-579.
    It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation— ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work in illuminating metaphysical dependence. I argue that Grounding is also unsuited to do this work. To start, Grounding alone cannot do this work, for bare claims of Grounding leave open such basic questions as whether (...)
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  • Reasoning: A Social Picture. By Anthony Simon Laden.Adam Morton - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):843-846.
    review of Laden's *Reasoning: a social picture* praising the aim and expressing puzzlement at the details,.
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  • Evidence and Religious Belief. Edited by Kelly James Clark, Raymond J. VanArragon. [REVIEW]Ignacio Silva - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):811-813.
    © 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThe volume that Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon have put together is excellent. The question about evidence for religious belief has been raised in recent times particularly within Reformed epistemology, and the authors writing in this volume face these issues with vigorous and persuasive arguments. The book includes eleven essays, and is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to exploring whether religious belief needs to be based on evidence. (...)
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  • Assertion: New Philosophical Essays. Edited by Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen. [REVIEW]Rachael Wiseman - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):832-835.
    The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 832-835, October 2013.
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  • How to be a modalist about essence.Nathan Wildman - 2016 - In Mark Jago (ed.), Reality Making. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
    Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...)
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  • Essence in abundance.Alexander Skiles - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (1):100-112.
    Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by (...)
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  • Identity criteria and ground.Kit Fine - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (1):1-19.
    I propose formulating identity criteria as generic statements of ground, thereby avoiding objections that have been made to the more usual formulations.
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  • The Possibility of Physicalism.Shamik Dasgupta - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy 111 (9-10):557-592.
    It has been suggested that many philosophical theses—physicalism, normative naturalism, phenomenalism, and so on—should be understood in terms of ground. Against this, Ted Sider (2011) has argued that ground is ill-suited for this purpose. Here I develop Sider’s objection and offer a response. In doing so I develop a view about the role of ground in philosophy, and about the content of these distinctively philosophical theses.
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  • Essence and Intrinsicality.David Denby - 2014 - In Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 87-109.
    In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...)
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  • Against Grounding Necessitarianism.Alexander Skiles - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (4):717-751.
    Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...)
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  • Varieties of ontological dependence.Kathrin Koslicki - 2012 - In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 186.
    A significant reorientation is currently under way in analytic metaphysics, away from an almost exclusive focus on questions of existence and towards a greater concentration on questions concerning the dependence of one type of phenomenon on another. Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its inception, interest in a systematic study of this concept has only recently surged among contemporary metaphysicians. In this paper, I focus on a promising account of ontological dependence in terms of a (...)
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  • Grounding and Necessity.Stephan Leuenberger - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (2):151-174.
    The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some (...)
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  • Guide to Ground.Kit Fine - 2012 - In Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 37--80.
    A number of philosophers have recently become receptive to the idea that, in addition to scientific or causal explanation, there may be a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation, in which explanans and explanandum are connected, not through some sort of causal mechanism, but through some constitutive form of determination. I myself have long been sympathetic to this idea of constitutive determination or ‘ontological ground’; and it is the aim of the present paper to help put the idea on a firmer (...)
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  • Modality, Sparsity, and Essence.Nathan Wildman - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):760-782.
    Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter‐examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are ‘fundamentally misguided’. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter‐examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness (...)
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  • Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction.Gideon Rosen - 2010 - In Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. qnew York: Oxford University Press. pp. 109-135.
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  • Essence, Necessity, and Explanation.Kathrin Koslicki - 2011 - In Tuomas E. Tahko (ed.), Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 187--206.
    It is common to think of essence along modal lines: the essential truths, on this approach, are a subset of the necessary truths. But Aristotle conceives of the necessary truths as being distinct and derivative from the essential truths. Such a non-modal conception of essence also constitutes a central component of the neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics defended over the last several decades by Kit Fine. Both Aristotle and Fine rely on a distinction between what belongs to the essence proper of (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Essence.Tuomas Tahko - 2018 - In Alexander Carruth, Sophie Gibb & John Heil (eds.), Ontology, Modality, and Mind: Themes From the Metaphysics of E. J. Lowe. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 93-110.
    The epistemology of essence is a topic that has received relatively little attention, although there are signs that this is changing. The lack of literature engaging directly with the topic is probably partly due to the mystery surrounding the notion of essence itself, and partly due to the sheer difficulty of developing a plausible epistemology. The need for such an account is clear especially for those, like E.J. Lowe, who are committed to a broadly Aristotelian conception of essence, whereby essence (...)
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  • On the Reduction of Necessity to Essence.Fabrice Correia - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):639-653.
    In his influential paper ‘‘Essence and Modality’’, Kit Fine argues that no account of essence framed in terms of metaphysical necessity is possible, and that it is rather metaphysical necessity which is to be understood in terms of essence. On his account, the concept of essence is primitive, and for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be true in virtue of the nature of all things. Fine also proposes a reduction of conceptual and logical necessity in (...)
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  • Some Puzzles of Ground.Kit Fine - 2010 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 51 (1):97-118.
    I describe some paradoxes of ground and relate them to the semantic paradoxes.
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  • Essence and modality.Kit Fine - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8 (Logic and Language):1-16.
    It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in (...)
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  • Generic essence, objectual essence, and modality.Fabrice Correia - 2006 - Noûs 40 (4):753–767.
    When thinking about the notion of essence or of an essential feature, philosophers typically focus on what I will call the notion of objectual essence. The main aim of this paper is to argue that beside this familiar notion stands another one, the notion of generic essence, which contrary to appearance cannot be understood in terms of the familiar notion, and which also fails to be correctly characterized by certain other accounts which naturally come to mind as well. Some of (...)
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  • Essence and modality.Edward N. Zalta - 2006 - Mind 115 (459):659-693.
    Some recently-proposed counterexamples to the traditional definition of essential property do not require a separate logic of essence. Instead, the examples can be analysed in terms of the logic and theory of abstract objects. This theory distinguishes between abstract and ordinary objects, and provides a general analysis of the essential properties of both kinds of object. The claim ‘x has F necessarily’ becomes ambiguous in the case of abstract objects, and in the case of ordinary objects there are various ways (...)
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  • Neutral relations revisited.Fraser MacBride - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):25–56.
    Do non‐symmetric relations apply to the objects they relate in an order? According to the standard view of relations, the difference between aRb and bRa obtaining, where R is non‐symmetric, corresponds to a difference in the order in which the non‐symmetric relation R applies to a and b. Recently Kit Fine has challenged the standard view in his important paper ‘Neutral Relations’ arguing that non‐symmetric relations are neutral, lacking direction or order. In this paper I argue that Fine cannot account (...)
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  • The essential and the accidental.Michael Gorman - 2005 - Ratio 18 (3):276–289.
    The distinction between the essential and the accidental characteristics of a thing should be understood not in modal terms (the received view) nor in definitional terms (Fine’s recent proposal) but as follows: an essential characteristic of a thing is one that is not explained by any other of that thing’s characteristics, and an accidental characteristic of a thing is one that is so explained. Various versions of this proposal can be formulated.
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  • The question of realism.Kit Fine - 2001 - Philosophers' Imprint 1:1-30.
    This paper distinguishes two kinds of realist issue -- the issue of whether the propositions of a given domain are factual and the issue of whether they are fundamental. It criticizes previous accounts of what these issues come to and suggests that they are to be understood in terms of a basic metaphysical concept of reality. This leaves open the question of how such issues are to be resolved; and it is argued that this may be done through consideration of (...)
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  • Semantics for the logic of essence.Kit Fine - 2000 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (6):543-584.
    This paper provides a possible worlds semantics for the system of the author's previous paper 'The Logic of Essence '. The basic idea behind the semantics is that a statement should be taken to be true in virtue of the nature of certain objects just in case it is true in any possible world compatible with the nature of those objects. It is shown that a slight variant of the original system is sound and complete under the proposed semantics.
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  • (Finean) essence and (priorean) modality.Fabrice Correia - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):63–84.
    In Fine 1994, Kit Fine challenges the view that the notion of essence is to be understood in terms of the metaphysical modalities, and he argues that it is not essence which reduces to metaphysical modality, but rather metaphysical modality which reduces to essence. In this paper I put forward a modal account of essence and argue that it is immune from Fine’s objections. The account presupposes a non‐standard, independently motivated conception of the metaphysical modalities which I dub Priorean. Arthur (...)
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  • What numbers could not be.Paul Benacerraf - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):47-73.
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  • The Universe As We Find It. By John Heil. [REVIEW]Nicholas K. Jones - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):839-841.
    This is a review of John Heil's "The Universe as We Find It".
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  • Composition as Identity Doesn’t Settle the Special Composition Question1.Ross P. Cameron - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):531-554.
    Orthodoxy says that the thesis that composition is identity (CAI) entails universalism: the claim that any collection of entities has a sum. If this is true it counts in favour of CAI, since a thesis about the nature of composition that settles the otherwise intractable special composition question (SCQ) is desirable. But I argue that it is false: CAI is compatible with the many forms of restricted composition, and SCQ is no easier to answer given CAI than otherwise. Furthermore, in (...)
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  • In defence of modal essentialism.Jonathan Livingstone-Banks - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (8):816-838.
    Kit Fine’s arguments in Essence and Modality are widely accepted as being a decisive blow against modal essentialism. A selection of replies exist that have done little to counter the general view that modally construed essence is out of touch with what we really mean when we make essentialist claims. I argue that Fine’s arguments fail to strike a decisive blow, and I suggest a new interpretation of the debate that shows why Fine’s arguments fall short of achieving their goal.
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  • The Coarse-Grainedness of Grounding.Kathrin Koslicki - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 9:306-344.
    After many years of enduring the drought and famine of Quinean ontology and Carnapian meta-ontology, the notion of ground, with its distinctively philosophical flavor, finally promises to give metaphysicians something they can believe in again and around which they can rally: their very own metaphysical explanatory connection which apparently cannot be reduced to, or analyzed in terms of, other familiar idioms such as identity, modality, parthood, supervenience, realization, causation or counterfactual dependence. Often, phenomena such as the following are cited as (...)
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  • Real Definition.Gideon Rosen - 2015 - Analytic Philosophy 56 (3):189-209.
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  • Ontological Dependence: An Opinionated Survey.Kathrin Koslicki - 2013 - In Benjamin Schnieder, Miguel Hoeltje & Alex Steinberg (eds.), Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Grounding, Supervenience, Response-Dependence (Basic Philosophical Concepts). Munich: Philosophia Verlag. pp. 31-64.
    This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., the essentialist construals) focus on conditions that (...)
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  • The modal view of essence.Sam Cowling - 2013 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (2):248-266.
    According to the modal view, essence admits of reductive analysis in exclusively modal terms. Fine (1994) argues that modal view delivers an inadequate analysis of essence. This paper defends the modal view from Fine's challenge. This defense proceeds by examining the disagreement between Finean primitivists and Quinean eliminativists about essence. In order to model this disagreement, a distinction between essence and a separable concept, nature, is required. This distinction is then used to show that Fine's challenge is misdirected and therefore (...)
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  • Recent Publications.[author unknown] - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):722-725.
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  • The Relation Between General and Particular: Entailment vs. Supervenience.Phillip Bricker - 2006 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Papers in Metaphysics, vol. 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 251-287.
    Some argue, following Bertrand Russell, that because general truths are not entailed by particular truths, general facts must be posited to exist in addition to particular facts. I argue on the contrary that because general truths (globally) supervene on particular truths, general facts are not needed in addition to particular facts; indeed, if one accepts the Humean denial of necessary connections between distinct existents, one can further conclude that there are no general facts. When entailment and supervenience do not coincide (...)
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  • The logic of essence.Kit Fine - 1995 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 24 (3):241 - 273.
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  • Response to Alan Weir.Kit Fine - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):117-125.
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  • The View From Within. Normativity and the Limits of Self‐Criticism. By Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji.Katerina Deligiorgi - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):816-819.
    The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 816-819, October 2013.
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  • Philosophy Without Intuitions. By Herman Cappelen.Kristoffer Ahlstrom‐Vij - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):821-823.
    © 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyExperimental results on the variability and intra‐personal instability of philosophical intuitions have recently sparked a lively methodological debate about the reliability of the philosophical method. In his new book, Herman Cappelen argues that this entire debate is misguided. The reason is simple: philosophers don't rely on intuitions, so there is no reason for philosophers to worry about their reliability. Cappelen's case for this claim amounts to one of the most original and well‐argued contributions (...)
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  • XIV*—Ontological Dependence.Kit Fine - 1995 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1):269-290.
    Kit Fine; XIV*—Ontological Dependence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.
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  • Senses of Essence.Kit Fine - 1995 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 53-73.
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  • The Pure Logic of Ground.Kit Fine - 2012 - Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (1):1-25.
    I lay down a system of structural rules for various notions of ground and establish soundness and completeness.
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  • Reasoning with arbitrary objects.Kit Fine - 1985 - New York, NY, USA: Blackwell.
    Contents: Preface VII; Introduction 1; 1. The General Framework 5; 2. Some Standard Systems 61; 3. Systems in General 147; 4. Non-Standard Systems 177; Bibliography 210; General Index 215; Index of Symbols 219-220.
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  • Response to Fabrice Correia.Kit Fine - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):85–88.
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  • (Finean) Essence and (Priorean) Modality.Fabrice Correia - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):63-84.
    In Fine 1994, Kit Fine challenges the view that the notion of essence is to be understood in terms of the metaphysical modalities, and he argues that it is not essence which reduces to metaphysical modality, but rather metaphysical modality which reduces to essence. In this paper I put forward a modal account of essence and argue that it is immune from Fine’s objections. The account presupposes a non‐standard, independently motivated conception of the metaphysical modalities which I dub Priorean. Arthur (...)
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  • Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects.Kit Fine - 1985 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 176 (3):402-403.
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  • Metaphysical Themes: 1274–1671. By Robert Pasnau.Michael Inwood - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):809-811.
    The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 809-811, October 2013.
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  • Contextualism, Multi‐Tasking, and Third‐Person Knowledge Reports: A Note on Keith DeRose’s The Case for Contextualism1.Peter Ludlow - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (3):686-692.
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